The Holy Land and Syria

Front matter

CARPENTER'S WORLD TRAVELS

Familiar Talks About Countries and Peoples

WITH THE AUTHOR ON THE SPOT AND THE READER IN HIS HOME, BASED ON THREE HUNDRED THOU- SAND MILES OF TRAVEL OVER THE GLOBE

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I Just a Word Before We Start . . i

II In the Land of Goshen .... 4

Chapter I Just A Word Before We Start

BY THE World War the Moslem was forced to the rear and Palestine has become more and more i the possession of Christian and Jew. General Allenby and his troops have taken the part of Richard the Lion-hearted and the Crusaders, and Jerusalem is at last out of the hands of the followers of the Prophet Mohammed. Among the innovations that followed are the removal of the tax gatherers who robbed the poor and the rich in the name of the Sultan, the safeguarding of the roads from the wandering Bedouins, and the reclaiming of the soil, so that the country bids fair to become once more the land of milk and honey that it was when it gladdened the tired eyes of the Israelites after their long wanderings in the desert of Sinai. Railways now cross the desert, connecting Palestine with Egypt and Turkey, and one may go on the cars from Cairo to Jerusalem and from Paris, via Constantinople and Damascus, to Galilee.

At the same time the Holy Land of the Bible is the Holy Land of to-day. It has the same skies as those under which the Wise Men followed the Star to the birthplace of Jesus. It has the same flowers as those trodden by Joseph and Mary, and the water in Jacob's Well is still sweet, notwithstanding it is now compared with that of the Nile which flows in pipes over the desert almost to the Pool of Siloam. The sheep still pasture on the hills as they did in the days of our Saviour, and boys and girls may be seen picking the tares from the wheat. Asses like Balaam's still carry their masters over the road, although their brays are now and then drowned in the horns of the automobiles; and the strange people one constantly meets personify Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Rachel and Ruth, and the other Bible characters who lived and loved in the days of the Scriptures.

All these belong to the Palestine perennial, and to that Palestine belong the talks of this book. They are based on the notes dictated to my stenographer or written by me in the midst of the scenes they describe. I give them as they came hot from the pen, changing only a line here and there to accord with the changing conditions.

We start in the Land of Goshen which Joseph gave to his father and brothers after he was sold to the Ishmaelites and carried down into Egypt, and enter Palestine at Jaffa, the city of Jonah and Simon the Tanner. We cross the plains of Sharon by rail, and travel back and forth over the Holy Land from Beersheba to Dan. Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Jericho and the Jordan, Shechem and Nazareth are among the places where we linger longest, and it is on the opposite side of the Sea of Galilee from Capernaum that we take the train for Damascus. In that city we go to the wall over which Saint Paul was let down in a basket, shop in the Street called Straight, and then, crossing the Abana, one of the rivers that Naaman the Leper would have preferred to the Jordan, ascend the

JUST A WORD BEFORE WE START

mountains of Lebanon to the ruins of Baalbek. We next climb down to the Mediterranean Sea at Beirut and sail north to Smyrna to pay our respects to the ruined shrine of the Goddess Diana on the site of old Ephesus. After a peep at Asia Minor we take a ship for home. Throughout the journey, the old is ever tramping on the heels of the new, and the Palestine of the future is seen through the veil of the Palestine of the past.

Chapter II

COME with me this bright Sunday morning for a look at the old Land of Goshen, where the Israelites settled when they first came into Egypt. I am writing this at Zagazig not far from the road down which Joseph was carried by the caravan of Ishmaelites, or Bedouins, who had bought him of his brothers and were on their way to sell him to Potiphar. It was over that same road that the brothers of Joseph came to buy corn in the seven years of famine. It was probably near Zagazig that Joseph met them and had the cup hidden in Benjamin's sack, and from Zagazig he came out in his chariot to meet his old father Jacob when by his advice the patriarch came into Egypt to live. Through him Goshen became a land of the Israelites, where they remained and prospered until he died, and those "who knew not Joseph" reigned in his stead.

The Land of Goshen is to-day one of the finest parts of the Nile Valley. My whole way from Cairo to Zagazig was through rich crops of cotton, sugar cane, and clover. There was green everywhere, and I could ride from here twenty miles more to the eastward before reaching the desert. The railroad from Cairo to the Suez Canal goes directly through Goshen. It strikes the canal at Ismailia and then branches off north and south, following the canal to Suez on the Red Sea, and to Port Said on the Mediterranean. The first section is over the road which led from Arabia to Memphis and Heliopolis, cities long since replaced by Cairo, the metropolis of Egypt. Zagazig, where I am stopping, is one of the chief cities in the Delta. It is on the freshwater canal and the big irrigation ditch which leads to the Nile. It is famous as a cotton port, and to-day camels are coming into the town with bales on their backs, and long trainloads are starting out for Alexandria and Port Said, whence the cotton will be shipped off to Europe and America.

The cotton scenes are features of the landscape unknown in the days of Joseph and Jacob. At that time the only clothes made in Egypt were of flax or wool. Nobody knew of the cotton plant, and it was not until the Middle Ages that Europe learned anything about it. The first knowledge of it was brought by the traveller, Sir John Mandeville, who said that the East Indians had a shrub or bush, half vegetable and half animal. It was called the vegetable lamb of Tartary. According to Sir John, it was a plant which blossomed out at the top in a living sheep that bent down and ate the grass growing luxuriantly about it. The sheep had a thick coat of wool, and from this came the cotton of India. Sir John wrote that this plant beast had flesh, bones, and blood, and that he had not only seen but eaten it. He closed with the statement that all thought it wonderful but that "God is marveyllous in his werkes."

This was about 1350 a.d., and many years before the real nature of cotton became known in Egypt and cotton seeds were planted. Now the crop is grown everywhere in Goshen, and thrives on almost every spot where the feet of the Israelites trod. It covers the Delta and large plantations have been set out even in old Nubia and the Sudan. Cotton has supplanted grain as a moneymaking crop and is worth far more than the grain that Joseph had cornered when the years of famine began.

This Land of Goshen is a fine stock country. Camels, buffaloes, and donkeys are staked out in the fields, and flocks of sheep and goats feed there, watched by shepherds. There are also droves of camels grazing or lying on the ground, chewing their cuds. All have their herdsmen. There are no fences in Egypt ; the fields are bounded by imaginary lines. Sometimes the limits are marked by water ditches, or little embankments made for irrigation.

It was as stock raisers that the Israelites came into Egypt. Perhaps it was because they were a pastoral people that Joseph had Pharaoh give them this Land of Goshen, the eastern part of which is fringed by the desert, with patches of scanty vegetation where the stock could graze. The Bible says that Joseph advised his brethren to say to Pharaoh, "Thy servants' trade hath been about cattle, from our youth even until now, both we and also our fathers"; for said he, "Every shepherd is an abomination unto the Egyptians.''

To-day the land is well cultivated. Most of the fields are kept like gardens, and I see half-naked men bending over and digging the soil with great mattocks. Here the farmers are ploughing, using the same one-handled plough of the days of the Scriptures. Some of them have donkeys and buffaloes hitched together, while now and then one sees a plough dragged along by a cow and a camel. There is much artificial irrigation. Sometimes the water is lifted from level to level by men with buckets and baskets to which ropes are slung. In other places it is raised by the sakieh, a rude wheel turned by the cogs of another wheel set at right angles to it. Clay jars are fastened on this perpendicular wheel, and as this moves through the water, the jars fill and empty themselves into the troughs which lead to the little canals. The motive power of the sakieh is a blindfolded camel, bullock, or donkey, the animal going around like a horse in an old-fashioned bark mill. Many of the fields are now under water and the silvery streams shine out through the emerald green of the crops.

When the Israelites first came to Goshen they probably lived in tents such as the Bedouins use to-day. These are made of sheep's wool or goat's hair rudely woven by hand. They are held up by ropes and poles and are so low that the people must crawl into them. We know that Abraham lived in a tent, and it is likely that this was the case with Isaac and Jacob.

After coming to Goshen the Israelites probably copied the houses of the Egyptians, building villages of mud huts not unlike those I now see. These homes are rude to an extreme. Many of them are less than twenty feet square; they have flat roofs and are often so low that I can see over them as I ride by on a camel. They have no gardens or lawns. Facing the street, they are huddled together without regard to beauty or comfort.

The roofs form the woodyards of the people below. The only fuel they have is cornstalks, straw, or the bushes from which the cotton has been picked. This stuff is tied up in bundles and laid away on the roofs until used.

There are but few trees to be seen. Now and then an acacia grows along the roadway, and here and there are clumps of date palms. There are occasional fruit gardens, and I have seen many green orchards loaded with oranges.

The roads are usually high above the rest of the country. They run along the canals, and consist of the dirt banked up to hold back the waters. The side roads are chiefly camel paths or foot paths, and one sees everywhere the traffic moving along through the fields. Even on the main roads there are few wagons. Most of the freight is carried on donkeys and camels, which are the common riding animals as well. Long-legged Egyptians in turbans and gowns sit on the rumps of little donkeys, their feet almost dragging; and fierce-looking Bedouins, their headdresses tied on with ropes, bob up and down as they ride on their camels, their heads bowing at every step of the beasts. There are camels loaded with alfalfa, the grass so covering them that they look like haystacks on legs. There are donkeys laden with boxes and bags, and mules and bullocks carrying freight of one kind or another. Out in the fields one now and then sees a buffalo with a a half-naked boy perched on it, and at nightfall the paths are lined with men coming from the fields riding these ungainly beasts and balancing their one-handled ploughs in front of them.

It was in Goshen that the Israelites worked after they were enslaved by the Egyptians. Here they built for Pharaoh the treasure cities of Pithom and Rameses, referred to in Exodus, from which they were sent out to build other cities and towns in various parts of the Nile Valley.

It was through rocky wastes such as this that Moses climbed to the top of Mount Sinai and there received the Ten Commandments, and there the Lord spoke with Moses "face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend"

The Land of Goshen still gets much of its water by the primitive wheel turned by a blindfolded and resentful camel. This is the land which fed Jacob and his family through the years of famine in Canaan

The archaeologists now excavating in Egypt tell me that they frequently find bricks which were undoubtedly made by them, and assert that the sun-dried bricks of to-day are practically the same as those the children of Israel moulded under the lash of their taskmasters.

This is true of the ruins of Bubastis, or the city of the worship of the cat. The remains of this town, which was situated within a stone's throw of the Zagazig of to-day, are still to be seen. Its many buildings of mud brick have crumbled almost to dust, but here and there the walls are plainly visible. There are several hundred acres of such ruins and I spent an hour or so to-day driving through them.

Bubastis dates back to the times when the Pyramids were young. It is supposed to have been built by the Israelites, and was a great city until it was captured by the Persians about 352 b. c. It was noted for its temples devoted to the cat-headed goddess. This lady had the form of a lioness with the head of a cat and held in one hand a lotus leaf as a sceptre. Herodotus tells of her and of this city, saying that the temples were gorgeous and that the stone road leading to them was one thousand eight hundred feet long. He says that as many as seven hundred thousand worshippers came to the annual festivities. He relates that many of the worshippers were women who often danced and acted "in an unseemly manner. "

Driving out to the Bubastis, I found there a brickyard in full swing. It was situated right on the edge of the ruins, and the fellaheen of to-day were moulding the clay used by the Israelites of the past into building material for the present. As I looked at them my mind went back to the days of the Pharaohs when Moses saw his people toiling under the lash. These men and women I watched were working under taskmasters or overseers. Their half-clad bodies were burnt black by the tropical sun and they looked not unlike slaves. Here they were grinding the mud, there they were moulding it into bricks, while farther over they were piling up those which had been dried in the sun. The bricks were carried by young girls, bossed by a burly negro with a stick in his hand. At his direction the girls took the bricks on their heads and carried them off on the trot. By bribing the negro overseer I got a photograph of this scene, and I doubt not my picture gives a fair idea of what went on in those long-ago days, when Pharaoh drove the Israelites to similar work.

Down through Goshen came Joseph and Mary fleeing with the infant Saviour from the wrath of Herod, the baby killer. This was then on the main highway from Palestine into Egypt, and there is no doubt that they stopped at Bubastis as they went on to Heliopolis. Not far from the obelisk of Heliopolis there is a tree under which Mary and Joseph and the young Jesus are said to have rested. It is about five miles from Cairo and guide books speak of it as one of the chief sights of Egypt. I doubt the reliability of their statements. The tree may be the descendant of one which stood there in the time of Christ. It is an old sycamore gnarled with many years and scarred with the names of tourists. It is on one of the estates of the Khedive, and may be seen through the bars of a fence which has been built around it to keep off the relic hunters. During my visit there I tried to climb the fence in order to get a photograph of it, but some of the Khedive's servants came up and warned me not to go in. The tree is surrounded by orange orchards which are irrigated by sakiehs worked by water buffaloes with blankets over their eyes.

As I went by I stopped at one of these sakiehs and the men brought me some oranges from the Khedive's orchard, selling them at the rate of eight for ten cents. They were wonderfully refreshing, and as I sat eating them in the shade of the trees outside the fence I wondered whether Mary and Joseph had not perhaps thus quenched their thirst in the same place nearly two thousand years ago. Any resting place must have been welcome after the long ride through the country to the edge of the great city of the sun.

There are other stories told of the stay of the Holy Family in Egypt. One is that Joseph and Mary took the infant Jesus out to the Pyramids, and from there to the Sphinx. It is said that Mary laid Him in the lap of the Sphinx, and that He slept for a night on the paws of that mighty stone beast, half lion, half woman.

As I travel through Egypt, these stories seem more vivid. I went down the other day to the banks of the Nile where the little baby Moses is said to have lain in the bulrushes in his boat of papyrus, and as I stood by the obelisk at Heliopolis I was reminded of the Virgin and the Saviour by a young girl who had a baby in her arms. She must have been about the same age that Mary was then, and the little one laughed and crowed as she rested there under the tropical sun. At the same time a score of other children ranging in age from two to twelve years gathered around me and posed for my camera in front of the obelisk. This great monolith was

1 1 undoubtedly standing when our Saviour was carried through Egypt, and it was erected long before the baby Moses was rescued from the waters of the Nile. The great stone shaft seemed to tie the past and the present together, and the children of to-day brought to my mind those of the times of the Saviour.

The children were glad to pose for me, but as I snapped the camera they rushed to the front with hands outstretched, begging for baksheesh. I was at a loss how to fee so many, and finally gave twenty-five cents to my coachman and left him, to fight it out with the babies. The little ones mobbed him and he had to threaten them with his carriage whip to keep them away. He finally ended the trouble by giving each two children one half a piastre, so that each received little more than one cent. This made them quite happy.

As I was about to leave the obelisk a party of American tourists drove up. Among them was a smart twelve-year-old boy who put his hands in his pockets and gazed up at the stone as though he were ready to buy it. As he did so I said to him:

"Hello, my little man, aren't you an American?"

"You bet I am/' he promptly replied. "I came from Chicago in the state of Illinois. You are English, aren't you?"

"No, I am an American, and my home is in Washington."

"Oh, yes," said the urchin. "I know all about that place. The President lives there. Say, what is the name of your ball team?"

That was the interesting thing to him. Out here under the shadow of an obelisk four thousand years old, on the spot where Joseph was married to Asenath; where Plato philosophized and where Moses played; within plain sight of the Pyramids and near enough almost to hear the whisper of the Sphinx, he cared nothing for them. He was a live boy, and he wanted live things. Therefore the pitchers, catchers, and shortstops of the great American diamond were worth more to him than all the stories of history and all the mummies of the museums.

Chapter III

I HAVE come up out of the land of Egypt, out of the Israelitish "house of bondage/' and am to-day on the edge of the Promised Land. I am at Jaffa, the ancient Joppa, and the port for the Holy City. When Jacob went down from the highlands of Samaria to the Land of Goshen to meet Joseph, his journey took several weeks. I made the trip in the opposite direction by land and sea in less than a day.

I took the express train at Cairo and in four hours was landed at Port Said, at the mouth of the Suez Canal, where I got a steamer which brought me to Jaffa. The whole way was through the lands of the Bible. We struck the canal at Ismailia, about midway of the Isthmus of Suez, and thence rode northward along its banks to Port Said.

Our steamer was crowded with pilgrims from Russia, Egypt, and north Africa. There were many Americans, French, and Germans travelling first class, and hundreds of Syrians and Egyptians going steerage. The Russian pilgrims were particularly interesting to me. Old men and old women, with honest faces full of intelligence and goodness, they held their religious services all over the third-class portion of the ship, and I spent two hours watching them as one after another they turned their faces toward the Holy City and prayed, crossing themselves, and now and then getting down upon their knees and bumping their heads against the deck in their worship. They were curiously dressed and many of them wore long fur coats. Some had high fur hats and looked as if they had just stepped out of one of Tolstoi's novels. I was especially impressed with the strength of character shown in their faces and with their magnificent physique. If all of Russia's millions are of the same mould as those who make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, they will some day prove to the world that there is in them as good stuff as ever made history or built up a civilization. The women, with their strong, motherly faces made heroic by toil and privation, were equally as striking as the men. They were better looking than any other peasant women I have ever seen, and the old saying of the Greeks came to me as I looked at them: "If strong be the frame of the mother, her sons shall make laws for the people."

As the ship approached the Holy Land the people broke out into prayers, and in some cases into tears. It is a religious pilgrimage for them and they think, I doubt not, that in making it they are coming nearer to heaven.

We had our first view of the shores of Palestine at seven o'clock in the morning, after a night on the steamer. We had been awakened at six with the cry that we were nearing shore, but this was a ruse of the captain to get breakfast out of the way before landing.

When I came up on deck nothing but the sea was in sight. The sun was about two hours high and the sky, a light blue with long streaks of fleecy white drawn like a half-veil over it, curved down into the ocean at the eastern horizon. As I looked I saw two lines of hazy gray rise up out of the water, which rippled in sapphire wavelets, caught by the sun. The first line was the sandy beach that edges the rich plains of Sharon and the second the wall of smoky gray which marks the hills of Judea or the highlands of Palestine. As we came nearer, these lines increased in size, until the first turned to dazzling white sand, out of which a little later the wooded green strip marking the port of Jaffa came into view. Nearer still we could see the shipping in the harbour, and above and behind it the walls of this, one of the oldest towns of the world.

We get some idea of the age of Jaffa from the story of Jonah; for the Bible says that it was from here Jonah took passage upon the ship from which he was thrown into the sea into the mouth of the whale. He remained in the whale's belly for three days, during which time he prayed to the Lord, and the Lord spake to the whale, whereupon he was vomited out upon dry land. Jonah was born about eight hundred and fifty years before Christ. He was a baby when, according to some authorities, Homer was telling the story of the Iliad, and a hundred years had yet to elapse before the founding of Rome. I am not sure as to the exact spot where Jonah was taken up by the sailors and thrown into the sea, but he is said to have been buried not far from Jerusalem, and there are dragomans who will show you his tomb. Ever since Jonah's time sailors have been superstitious about having preachers along, thinking that such passengers bring bad luck to a ship.

The harbour of Jaffa is one of the worst in the world. It is almost always rough and often so much so that it is impossible to land. Upon our arrival there was such a

These brickmakers work under a taskmaster to-day just as the Israelites toiled under the lash in this spot nearly four thousand years ago. Here was built Bubastes, the ancient Egyptian city sacred to the worship of the Cat

We go ashore in small boats at the city of Jonah, which rises almost straight out of the water — but we see no whales

The best view of Jaffa is had from the roof of the House of Simon the tanner where St. Peter had the vision which led to the preaching of Christ to the Gentiles.

swell that the boats which took us ashore bobbed up and down and the waves soaked our baggage.

As to Jon^h himself and his narrow escape, one of our preachers on board has quoted a new version of why he and the whale parted company :

" I threw up Jonah," said the whale,

Who'd lately come to town; " I threw up Jonah,

For I could not keep a good man down."

In coming in I looked for whales. There were none in sight, although I am told they are still to be seen in the Mediterranean. In their place, however, were many jellyfish of an opalescent blue. These fish were as big as a football and of the shape of a mushroom. There were hundreds of them floating about and bumping against the hull of our ship as we lay at anchor.

Besides the story of Jonah there are many well-authenticated facts about Jaffa which make it interesting. It has always been the chief port for the Holy Land. It was at one time owned by the Phoenicians, and later, when Solomon built the temple, it was here that the timber used in its construction was landed. Most of this was cedar which came from the forests of Lebanon several hundred miles up the coast. The logs were dragged down the mountains and thrown into the sea at Tyre and Sidon. They were there made into rafts and towed down to Jaffa, whence they were carried up to Jerusalem by camels and men.

Jaffa was an important port in the days of the Crusades, and was fought for again and again. At one time its walls were overthrown by Saladin, but a little later they were rebuilt by Richard the Lion-hearted, the King of England, who came here in a vain attempt to rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the hands of the Turks. In addition to all this there is a tradition that Andromeda, the beautiful daughter of the mythical king of this country, was here chained to the rocks in order that she might appease a huge sea serpent which threatened to eat up the people. While so imperilled she was rescued by Perseus, who killed the monster and married her. In Pliny's time the historians state that the chains by which Andromeda was bound to the rocks were still to be seen, and that the bones of the sea serpent were carried to Rome and placed upon exhibition there.

The Jaffa of to-day stands upon a bluff washed by the Mediterranean Sea. The city is built right on the rocks, with its yellow, white, and blue houses coming down to the cliff edge. They rise up the steep sides of the bluff which makes a wall cutting off the view of the country behind. At the south of the bluff, as far as one can see, are white sands. At the north are orange groves and then more sand.